In the engine room of the 'Villa de Pitanxo': "Everything is flying through the cabins"

At 2:29 p.m. in Spain on February 15, in the waters of Newfoundland (10:59 p.m. there), a man born in Moaña (Pontevedra) 54 years ago, Fernando González, receives a WhatsApp text from his partner in which she He informs her that he has an upset stomach.

They exchange various messages.

He gives her cuddles and advice (“give her warmth”, “put a warm cloth on her”).

The man attends to the mobile and to work, oiler of the

fishing boat .

He has worked impossible schedules, as he has communicated to his family.

He sent a photo and a message to a cousin of his: "This is the face that remains after working 20 hours straight."

But at that moment, this machine worker at

She doesn't think about her cousin but about her current partner, whom she takes care of from a distance while enduring impossible waves.

At 2.51 in Spain, Fernando González asks her: "My girl, did you have a stomachache?"

And immediately afterwards he writes to her: “Here with the storm everything is blowing up in the cabins”.

The woman announces: “

The last time that Fernando González enters his WhatsApp is at 3:47.

More information

The other drama after a shipwreck: lack of answers and a bureaucratic ordeal

At 5:24 a.m. in the frozen waters of Newfoundland, the blue box of the Galician fishing vessel of the Nores de Marín group (Pontevedra), with 24 crew members, stops working and disappears from the system of the Spanish Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries in which broadcasts a live signal with its position.

Half an hour later, the ship's radio beacon launches an automatic emergency warning;

that means that this satellite device, located outside the bridge, has come into contact with the water.

Its signal is broadcast urgently and replicated by satellites to the Spanish Maritime Rescue Coordination Center and to the nearest coastal emergency service, in this case the Halifax Rescue Coordination Center in Canada.

His staff deciphers the radio beacon code to find out which ship it is,

"My father was scared with the sea," Christopher González, eldest son of one of the victims of the shipwreck, tells EL PAÍS.

He assumes that he was working on the machines with the boss, Francisco de Pazos.

If so, the two of them were left with no way out and trapped on a ship that, in a matter of minutes, became a death trap in the worst Atlantic.

Operators lower one of the people who died in the shipwreck of the Galician ship with the help of a crane, upon arrival at the port of San Juan de Terranova, this Saturday. PAUL DALY - Europa Press (Europa Press)

The first ship to come to the rescue, the

, a Galician ship belonging to shipowners from Cangas, did so almost four hours after the emergency warning.

There was no trace of the

, sunk to the bottom of the sea (at more than 1,000 meters) in just over ten minutes.

It was a dark night, there was a fog that did not allow seeing beyond 300 meters, waves between six and eight meters, icy wind of 80 kilometers per hour and water with a temperature of three degrees below zero.

Hell.

"The first thing you feel when you fall into a sea of ​​that temperature are chills and shivering, which is the body's way of defending itself to provide heat," explains doctor Javier Castro, from Sanxenxo.

“But the activity of the enzymes begins to fail, the muscles weaken, dizziness begins (you can barely move, you see poorly), you lose consciousness and you go into cardiac arrest.

It's hypothermia.

In a sea of ​​three degrees below zero, you cannot survive more than ten minutes”.

In this apocalyptic scenario, the

located two large rafts at the mercy of the storm and giant waves.

They were the life rafts with which Marin's freezer trawler was equipped;

inside two drums and on a kind of ramp, when the ship sinks, the rafts jump and inflate automatically.

Each one had a capacity of 25 people;

one of the rafts was empty, and in the other the

Dos found three survivors with symptoms of hypothermia after resisting in a Dantesque scenario (captain Juan Padín and his nephew Eduardo Rial, from Cangas, and Samuel Kwesi, from Ghana but settled in Marín) and four deceased with them.

The

, late in the day, recovered two other bodies in the area of ​​the wreck and a Portuguese vessel,

, one more.

Late in the day, a Canadian ship,

, found two more.

Three survivors, nine bodies found and twelve people missing in international waters, some of them probably inside the ship as they could not get out in time.

Like Fernando González, if he found himself in the engine room: "I know that ship, and if my father was there when the ship sank, under everything, it would be very difficult for him to get out," says Christopher, his son.

Many of the deceased did not have time to put on the anti-thermal suit, spectacular garments several centimeters thick with which they would last much longer in the water, although not the hours it took to arrive, in impossible conditions, the first fishing.

When he did, the skipper of the

Ramón Porto, told

that the captain of the

he was in shock (mental and physical) and that the only interest of him and the other two survivors were their shipmates who had fallen into the sea: that they look for them, that they keep looking for them.

Then, as soon as they could, they called their families to give them unusual news: that they were alive, they had survived almost four hours at the mercy of the sea and the cold, knowing that they could not have endured much longer, because hypothermia was beginning to take effect. .

The chief engineer of

it was Francisco de Pazos, a 69-year-old man from Marín who had already retired, but asked again to register with Social Security to continue working.

It is a rare case of passion, that of enlisting in a high seas tide, but Francisco de Pazos satisfied it by going out once or twice a year.

Of course, his wife did not want him to embark again.

He was married with three daughters;

One of them, María José de Pazos, believes that is why her father had not told her mother about the state of the sea hours before the shipwreck.

“All the families say that their loved ones told them that the weather was infernal, infernal… He didn't say anything.

That everything was going well, that he was happy and, yes, that it was very cold.

I guess he didn't say anything so my mom wouldn't worry and say, 'See?

What did you go for?

At six in the afternoon this Saturday the 19th,

a call informs her family that her father is not among the recovered bodies;

he is one of twelve missing in Newfoundland waters.

“I was afraid of it”, he says on the phone: “If he was working on the machines…”.

María José de Pazos has just spoken with Christopher González, son of the greaser Fernando González.

The crew member is also not among the deceased who have traveled in the

48 hours to the first port, San Juan de Terranova, more than 400 kilometers from where the

was fishing .

María José de Pazos remembers that her father left home without ceremony or ritual, among other things because his wife, since he was young, always cries when he boards: "He has a bad time."

So the man made an effort to make his march to the high seas for weeks seem, as his daughter says, "to go to the office tomorrow."

Except that his office was in the guts of a fishing boat that fished in the most dangerous fishing grounds in the world, Newfoundland.

There

e was dedicated to fishing for Greenland halibut, a not very attractive species, less valuable than cod (the fish that the Basques were chasing to Newfoundland years before Columbus arrived in America, more than five centuries ago) and with little flavor, but white, easy to fillet and boneless;

In Asia it is in great demand.

The ship (which had recently left the shipyard after undergoing a thorough review according to the shipowner, although several relatives of the victims raise the possibility that it was in poor condition, and that it was even a machine failure that caused the ship was left to the mercy of the waves) was, in itself, a small undertaking.

The codend (the sack-shaped net) is cast with a device that indicates its weight so you know when to collect it, and thus save time and resources.

Pitanxo is a street in Marín that has a special sentimental relationship with Manuel Nores, a historic 91-year-old shipowner who, when the event occurred, was admitted to a hospital and who, due to this condition, was gradually informed of the event without reaching the end, that the shipwreck of the

It is the worst tragedy of Spanish fishing in 38 years.

Something that has forced the Government Subdelegation to activate a victim care protocol identical to the one organized on the occasion of the Angrois train accident in Santiago: that the information be passed on by the administration to teams of psychologists and the Red Cross, and from these to relatives.

However, the criticism intensifies on the part of the families: they allege a lack of data (they learned of the suspension of the rescue tasks by Canada before Spain) and the lack of interest of the Spanish Government in continuing a search that is considered insufficient.

Meanwhile, in the absence of survivors speaking, versions are circulating of what could have happened in Newfoundland.

reported the possibility that, while the floodgates were being opened to collect the codend with the catch, a large mass of water suddenly entered and suddenly unbalanced the ship, sinking the stern and putting the

vertically to end up being quickly swallowed by the ocean.

Sources close to the shipowner, which coincide with what was communicated to some relatives, speak of a 'wave train', a violent succession of waves that can reach ten meters in a row from which the boat does not recover or bail out water, one after another, until it begins to sink.

"Two strong blows of the sea," the owner told some relatives who prefer to remain anonymous, ended the ship and the lives of almost everyone who worked on it in just a few minutes.

Everyone - relatives, shipowner and administration - promise to know the truth of what happened in the hell unleashed in Newfoundland in the worst month of storms, with the ocean full of ice and a sea that kills shortly after first contact.

Only three people out of 24 know it.

Exclusive content for subscribers

read without limits

subscribe

I'm already a subscriber